Most of us don’t associate “murder” with the type of news coming from Israel that make newspapers around the world.

Unfortunately, this has been the big news coming out of Israel for the past two weeks. It’s a very complicated story, involving twisted and abnormal family dynamics:

A four-year-old French girl, Rose, was murdered by her grandfather, Ronny Ron. The Rose’s mother (a French immigrant to Israel named Marie Pisam) had left her husband, Rose’s father. Marie left her husband after falling in love with her husband’s father–Ronny Ron. Then, Rose’s father took her back to France with him, while Marie and Ronny remained in Israel together. Marie won custody of Rose in December, after hearing that her father was negligent back in France.

Due to some severe learning disabilities, Ronny and Marie didn’t know how to care for her properly. Instead, Ronny’s mother (Rose’s great-grandmother) took care of her. After having a dispute with his mother, Ronny came to take Rose back. Two months later, after having not seen Rose since Ronny took her back, Ronny’s mother came to Israel’s child welfare authorities with her concerns.

Ronny has admitted to killing Rose (although there are alternate details to the story), stuffing her body in a bag, and throwing it in the Yarkon River. Ronny and Marie are currently on trial.

Needless to say, Israel is shocked—but more shocked than another country might be.

The general sentiment in response to the developing case is disbelief: “Israelis like to tell each other that in America you can fall in the street and nobody will care. Now we fear this is happening to us here,” a New York Times article quotes Israel’s channel 2 news broadcaster Oded Ben Ami as saying. The sentiment is particularly strong, because the missing and neglected girl had gone virtually unnoticed by Israeli society until a gag order was removed on August 26.

Yigal Palmor, a Foreign Ministry official, says, “We think of [Israel] as a place where everyone is in everyone else’s business. Yet this happened here.”